It remains, more than 20 years later, one of the show's great, laugh-out-loud moments.Įvery Simpsons fan will have their own favourite – for me, it's pretty much all of the season six cliffhanger and season seven opener split episode, Who Shot Mr Burns? It’s a Dallas homage that also packs in references to the Mambo Kings, Hitchcock's Vertigo and in Homer's cellmate Dr Colossus, every B-movie mad scientist ever. The entire scene is a glorious pastiche of the opening of Steven Spielberg's Raiders of the Lost Ark (itself a knowing tribute to those rough-and-tumble Saturday morning matinees Spielberg loved as a child), complete with Homer resembling a giant boulder in an epic chase down the stairs. That's perfectly encapsulated by the opening of the episode Bart's Friend Falls in Love, where Bart Simpson steals a jar of pennies from his dozing father.

But it's around the third season (1991-92) that it starts achieving the high notes that, arguably, made the comedy the decade's best.

In those early Simpsons seasons – the animations more crudely drawn, the voices not quite as realised, the writers still fleshing out the family's personalities – there were flashes of this pop culture mining.

The Simpsons began as a kind of updated version of The Flintstones, the 1960s primetime cartoon caper that stuck a pretty standard sitcom formula in a Stone Age setting even Groening's concept was a reference to something the audience would have recognised from their childhoods. 'Matt Groening’s iconic animated series turned hyper-referentiality into an art form, regularly packing in throwaway references to high and low culture right from the start,' wrote Darren Franich in Entertainment Weekly. And that attention to detail is one of the main reasons the show has worked (and, partly, built its massive audience). All of them have appeared in the traditional opening couch sequence in each episode. You'd have to have been paying very close attention to The Simpsons over the past 25 years to have noticed the link. What do The Flintstones, Monty Python's Flying Circus, The Brady Bunch and Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band all have in common? And for that matter horror classic Nightmare on Elm Street, Dr Strangelove, physical theatre troupe Blue Man Group and 1960s spy spoof Get Smart?

Future Sounds by David Stubbs